Oldham insight: Manchester facts 2026

Oldham residents will feel Manchester's next health overhaul in GP waiting rooms and care visits, after council chief Tom Stannard was asked to steer the city-wide Integrated Care Partnership.

The brief is blunt: 580,000 Mancunians still die years earlier in Moss Side than in Mossley Park, and the 200-language city wants that gap closed without another reorganisation that ignores neighbourhood workers.

Manchester already carries the weight of its own history. Twenty-five Nobel laureates, Alan Turing's legacy, and Emmeline Pankhurst's footsteps are printed here, yet today one in three children leaves primary school overweight and hospital wards regularly breach safe occupancy.

Stannard's new post gives him formal power to merge council cash with £1.3 billion NHS Manchester funds, a purse large enough to buy every household a year of fresh veg but historically spent in hospital corridors.

Oldham's clinics sit inside the same partnership boundary, so if the team can shift money into earlier help, local physio queues and mental-health waits should shorten; if not, the city's two famous football clubs will keep filling stadiums while ordinary fans wait longer for hip replacements.